Alibaba, a Chinese conglomerate behemoth that also happens to have the largest internet and e-commerce presence in China, has launched a cloud-based smartphone operating system, Aliyun OS, that apparently “runs” from the AliCloud — and more importantly, it is also compatible with all Android applications. Alibaba has also announced the first phone to use the new OS, the K-Touch Cloud-Smart Phone W700, which is a re-branded Tian Hua K-Touch. More mobile phones and tablets running Aliyun OS are due later in the year, too.

Exact details on how Aliyun OS is integrated with the cloud are hard to come by. The press release makes it sound like “cloud apps” will basically be websites/apps that can either be hosted by the developers or in the AliCloud — much in the same way that developers can host sites with Amazon S3 and EC2, or Google App Engine. To quote the press release: “The cloud OS will feature cloud services including e-mail, Internet search, weather updates and mapping&GPS navigation tools” — doesn’t that just sound like the phone will have a web browser? Alibaba does go on to say that call logs, text messages, and photos will be automatically synchronized and accessible from any web-connected computer or mobile device — a bit like Apple’s iCloud, in fact. Users will get 100GB of storage in the AliCloud, though, which is a smidgen more than the meager megabytes granted by Google and Apple — and still four times what Microsoft’s SkyDrive offers.

To be truly cloud-based, Aliyun OS would need to use the cloud as its file system — which AliCloud has the potential for, but realistically connection speeds and latency issues make this untenable… at least until 4G or 5G services roll out, anyway. In all likelihood, the K-Touch Cloud-Smart Phone W700, which is due out in the next few days, will just be a normal smartphone, but perhaps with a customized web browser that better lends itself to web apps. Perhaps Alibaba can be forgiven for touting the flavor-of-the-year cloud cliché, though: at about 2,700 yen — $410 — it’s about half the price of an Apple iPhone or Samsung Galaxy S II. We don’t know the exact spec on the W700 yet, but it probably won’t be far off the Apple or Samsung offerings — and judging by some photos on Sina, the W700 will be a very attractive phone too.

And then there’s the fact that Aliyun OS will run Android applications. Presumably it won’t have Android Market access, but that’s OK because there’s always the China Mobile-owned MMarket, which stocks apps for every variety of smartphone, and there’s the recently-launched GoAPK, too. But how will Aliyun run Android apps? Alibaba says it has been working on the new OS for three years, which means it could be an entirely new piece of software with an Android emulation layer (like the PlayBook) — but it’s also very possible that Aliyun is Android. After all, this cloud-based OS doesn’t sound like it provides functionality that isn’t already available on any modern smartphone — and really, it looks like Alibaba might have just reskinned Android to look a bit like iOS, stirred in a few buzzwords to generate a bit of attention from the media, and sat back to enjoy the ride.

Aliyun OS — is it Android in disguise?

It’s impossible to say without getting our hands on a copy of the OS, but the most telltale sign that Aliyun is in fact Android is the clock in the top right corner of the screenshot above. The timestamp — 13:55 — uses exactly the same font as Android. Curiously, the font in the left-hand screenshot is different — perhaps the right-hand screenshot was taken before the last vestiges of Androidness could be scrubbed out of existence? Of course it might just be coincidence — and even if it isn’t, there’s no harm in Alibaba re-using Android 2.1 or 2.2 to make Aliyun; it’s an open source project, after all. Plus, if Aliyun is Android-based, you’d expect Alibaba to acknowledge it somewhere and make the GPL’d source code available to download…

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